Westerville school board selects superintendent

A top administrator in the South-Western school district has been named the next superintendent of Westerville schools.

Collin Binkley, The Columbus Dispatch

A top administrator in the South-Western school district has been named the next superintendent of Westerville schools.

John R. Kellogg, 50, will take over in Westerville next school year, replacing Dan Good, who plans to retire after six years in charge of the district. The school board voted 4-0 last night to hire Kellogg, the assistant superintendent of curriculum for South-Western. Board member Cindy Crowe was absent but had sent a statement supporting Kellogg.

The board also heard from several parents last night who said they feel blindsided by the district’s plans to redraw attendance boundaries for elementary schools.

Westerville will pay Kellogg a salary of $185,000, compared to the $189,000 that Good, 51, earned in his most-recent contract. Kellogg will pay his own contribution to the state retirement system for teachers; the district has paid Good’s contribution.

The three-year contract urges Kellogg to move to Westerville by 2014 and gives him a one-time payment of $7,500 for moving. He now lives in Bexley. The deal also provides allowances for travel and cellphone use, but doesn’t include bonuses or a car allowance.

Kellogg began his career as a high-school teacher in Virginia, but he has been an administrator since he began working in central Ohio schools in 1997.

His first job in the area was as principal of Grove City High School in the South-Western district. But his longest tenure, eight years, was as principal of Bexley High School.

In Bexley, he expanded the Advanced Placement program, increasing the number of AP tests that students took from 90 to 600. He returned to South-Western in 2010 as executive director of secondary education, but after a year he was named assistant superintendent of curriculum.

At South-Western, he and his staff focused on student data to determine what worked in the classroom and what didn’t. The district’s performance index has increased each year since he returned in 2010, from 91.6 to 95.1 last school year.

His salary in the South-Western district was $131,000 this year. In his application, he said he expected a salary of $155,000 if hired.

Other than Kellogg, the school board interviewed Steven E. Estepp, executive director of K-12 curriculum in Hilliard City Schools, and John D. Stanford, deputy superintendent of Columbus City Schools.

Kellogg was at the meeting last night, which drew dozens of residents, including about 20 who wore red to signify their opposition to redistricting plans that could move their students to different schools.

The district has been planning since last year to close its magnet schools, which enroll based on a lottery system, and return those students to their neighborhood schools as a cost-cutting measure.

But that would put seven of the district’s 12 elementary schools over capacity and worsen disparities in student race and household income from school to school. Aiming to avoid that, the board created a group of administrators and three parents to draft new boundary possibilities.

Each of three scenarios presented tonight would send some students far across the district to help balance demographics and ease crowding. But parents said they chose their houses because of the schools they were near.

Although Crowe wasn’t at the meeting, another board member read a statement she wrote, questioning whether the district should end the magnet program. “I am not convinced that we will see any savings as first predicted,” she wrote.

Other board members said they were firm in the decision to end the magnet program, and that they must now focus on balancing schools. The board plans to decide on new boundaries on March 11, to take effect next school year.

cbinkley@dispatch.com

@cbinkley

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